The 19th-century English theologian and churchman John Henry Newman spent much of his career reflecting on this question. As an undergraduate at Oxford, he wrote to his father that “if anyone should ask me what qualifications were necessary for [admission], I should say there was only one—Drink, drink, drink.” As a mature thinker, Newman developed a sophisticated argument against those who favored the uncompromising secularization of the university, contending that their position stemmed from overconfidence in the power of human knowledge. Edward Short writes:
Before converting to Roman Catholicism, Newman . . . sent a series of brilliant letters to the Times of London opposing a reading room sponsored by Sir Robert Peel and Lord Brougham that would exclude all books of theology from its shelves. Later published as The Tamworth Reading Room (1841), the letters attacked the cult of knowledge, which Newman saw as an outcrop of the relativist and atheist rationalism of the Enlightenment. . . . Since the false god of knowledge still stultifies the study of the liberal arts, his objections to it remain compelling.
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